


Blood on my Name

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2016 [2]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Originals (TV)
Genre: Buffy Insert, Buffy as Anne - Freeform, Gen, I don't know, Klaus Being his Slightly Psychotic Self, Mentions of Rape, Not Beta Read, Post Series, Prompt Fic, Violence, Wishlist_Fic, okay?, post season two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-03
Updated: 2016-12-03
Packaged: 2018-09-06 05:02:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8735899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: In which Klaus saves a damsel, is his usual unpredictable self and Buffy doesn't try to kill him. Or does she?(Wishlist, Day 2)





	

**Author's Note:**

> This one is for yakshini, who asked for Buffy/Klaus (though I only managed a pre-relationship thing) and two quotes: "I've got blood on my name." and "You were born a weapon." I bastardized both to fit. But in a nice way, okay?
> 
> I hope you like it, despite the fact that it's more teaser than story.

+

She is a tiny thing when he meets her, young, small, fragile. Younger than he can ever remember being, really. 

He hears her struggling in an alley, is bored enough, angry enough, to go and see, to rip her would be rapist off her and drain the man of every drop of blood in his body. Then he breaks his neck for good measure and lets the body drop like the garbage it is. 

Face still bloody, eyes still black pits, he turns to her, tiny thing, and waits for her to scream. 

She doesn’t. Her green eyes are huge in a pale face framed by light hair, but her hand is steady where it is gripping a stake, half-hidden behind her thigh. She smells of vervain. 

Slowly, Klaus lets the monster fade from his face, wipes his mouth on a sleeve, studying her as she studies him. How old is she? Sixteen? Seventeen? 

Rebekah’s physical age, but he can’t remember his sister ever looking so dainty. So breakable. 

“Now why would you be carrying weapons to fight my kind, but let this piece of trash,” he kicks at the body at his feet for emphasis, “rape you in a filthy alleyway?”

“He was robbing me, not trying to,” she hesitates, “do anything else.”

Cute. 

“And you were letting him.”

She shrugs and Klaus takes a second look at her, at the slump of her shoulders, the food-stained uniform dress and apron, the worn sneakers on her feet, the dark circles under her eyes and the hollow look of her cheeks. 

Tired. 

If one word sums up this little hunter, it’s tired. 

Even now, she smells only of apprehension and exhaustion under the pungent stink of that blasted herb. Barely any adrenaline, no fear, no anger. 

This one is done with the world, it seems. 

Or maybe it is done with her. She is surely damaged, in some way, and Klaus has always been fascinated by what is ruined beyond repair. We love ourselves reflected in others, isn’t that how the saying goes?

“Let me walk you home,” he offers, impulsively, as he does everything. She is young and fragile and dyingdead and he wants to study her a little longer. Maybe, later, he’ll find canvas, shade it black and carefully fill in the rose of her cheeks, the light of her hair, like a halo, the pungent mud green and grey of the muck at her feet. He’ll call the painting Dark and the Girl and compel a random gallery owner to display it, allowing humans to marvel and wonder and completely miss the point.

He tells himself that as he watches emotion flit across the girl’s face for the first time. It culminates in a snort. 

“Really? The big, bad vampire is offering to walk me home?” she wiggles her stake in the space between them. “You just killed a guy in front of me. What makes you think I’m letting that go?”

Bravado. 

“He was filth and that stake cannot kill me, sweetheart, so if you need to get it out of your system, go right ahead.” He flashes fang at her. “I guarantee, though, that these can kill you.”

She frowns. “No vampire’s immune to wood. Poof and gone. Save the dramatics for the people who believe them.”

“Oh, but I am,” he croons, taking one step closer, a second, until she raises her weapon instinctively, point pressing against his chest, perfect angle to reach the heart. “I am Niklaus Mikaelson, and it takes more than a little hunterling to kill me, love.”

His smile is full of teeth as her heartbeat stop-stutters a beat. “Mikaelson,” she mutters, then brightens as realization sets in. “I read about you, once, in a big old book.”

“Mhm?” He presses further into the stake just to see what she’ll do. 

She presses back, meeting his gaze, unafraid. There’s a spark in her, all of a sudden, that wasn’t there before. “It was blah, blah, your name is one of the bloodiest in all of history, blah.”

He snorts. “The author knew me well, then.”

“I’m pretty sure if he’d known you, he wouldn’t have written that book, because he would have been dead.” She takes an abrupt step to one side, sliding down and around him with clever, quick footing, reversing their positions so that he’s the one cornered in a dead-end alley now.

He lets her. “I see you know me, too,” he drawls, smiling.

She hefts her stake higher. “So? Are we going to fight?”

“I just informed you that your weapon is useless against me. Weren’t you listening?”

It’s her turn to snort. “So what? Should I just lie down and die?”

Her heart pitter-patters in her chest again, skewed and off-beat and oh, oh. “Do you want to, little hunter?”

He expects her to banter back, to snap and snarl, but she smiles, suddenly, a small, twisted thing. In lieu of an answer, she tells him, “It’s slayer, actually, not hunter.”

And oh, oh, now she makes sense. The grace of her and the defeat, the weapon and the youth. The very thing made to slaughter his kind and yet, some part of her is older than him, if the rumors are to be believed. Klaus is _fascinated_. 

He laughs. “My brother is enthralled with your kind. He’d envy me if he knew I met one.” 

“Cool. Want an autograph for him, or something?” she rolls her eyes, that veneer of bravado plastered back on between one breath and the next. She bounces between extremes almost as quickly as Klaus does on a bad day. 

“He calls you born weapons, my brother. Death bringers, killers, monsters.”

Kol has more words for her kind, all uncomplimentary, all spoken with a demented, bloody reverence only Kol is capable of.

The girl’s – slayer’s – expression turns wry again, turns into that old, tired thing he’s glimpsed before. How old is she? How long has she been battling his kind? She didn’t even flinch when he murdered the human now lying at her feet, just watched him with wary, weary eyes like she’d seen it all before. 

“I won’t fight you,” he informs her, as impulsive as his offer to take her home. Speaking of, he holds out his arm, elbow crooked. “Now, allow me to walk you home, yes, love?”

“I don’t-“ she slumps, suddenly, all energy gone from her. Tucking her stake back to wherever it came from, she mutters, “Why the hell not? I don’t really give a damn.”

“That’s the spirit, love.”

She snorts, oscillating between dark amusement and suicidal resignation and accepts the arm he offers her as she silently directs him to the left, away from the alley.

After a few minutes of silence, Klaus points out a particularly bad graffiti, criticizing the lack of stylistic coherence. She laughs, teases him and suddenly, they make small talk like any other couple out for a late night stroll, friendly and plain, and she lets him walk her all the way to a rat-infested cesspool of human despair she calls home. There she untangles herself from him and offers him an awkward smile.

The reality of what they are crashes the moment, stomping it flat.

“So. Pity from Niklaus Mikaelson, the great monster. I must really be pathetic, huh?”

Actually, Klaus thinks her strangely graceful in her defeat. He has always liked the lost causes best, after all, and there is nothing quite as lost as a little girl made weapon. 

Mikael tried to do that to him, once. Make him a weapon. Make him a man, instead of sniveling coward. Instead, Klaus broke; broke jagged enough to still be cutting himself on the pieces a thousand years later. 

This slayer, she didn’t break. She just bent and eventually, bent too far. 

The plain truth is that he doesn’t want to kill her. 

“Sleep tight,” he tells her, “and stop hanging about alleyways, love.”

+

It’s almost sad, knowing that she’ll be dead within the year and he’ll never see her again. 

+

Almost two decades later, in the city of his heart, Marcel drops into Klaus’ favorite armchair with a sigh and announces, “We have a problem.”

Klaus studies his adoptive son’s slouch, dirty jeans staining the antique silk upholstery. “Indeed we do.”

Marcel, noticing his glare, snorts and bends over to steal Klaus’ glass of bourbon from the side table, too. “Oh, yeah, we do. There’s a slayer ripping through the minions, Klaus. And we can’t pin her down long enough to kill her.”

A slayer? 

Automatically, Klaus’ mind goes back to the last slayer he met, the one who never even told him her name. The tag on her uniform said ‘Anne’, but he doubts it was real.

He knows it isn’t her, can’t possibly be. At this point, she’s probably been dead longer than she ever was alive, but he wants to see this new one. See if she has the same look in her eyes, the same clever tongue. 

In a strange way, he wants to see if this newest born weapon can measure up to the one he met. To _his_ , as dramatic as that sounds.

He makes Marcel take him to where she was last seen, which just so happens to be one of his childe’s tourist-trap clubs. She’s there, on the dancefloor, ringed by lowlives who think they can take a slayer on their own, lunging for her like rabid dogs. She takes them out, one after the other, until there is nothing left of them except rapidly desiccating corpses. 

Marcel’s is grinding his teeth, furious at her killing his minions, but Klaus doesn’t care. If they are obvious enough to attract a slayer’s attention and stupid enough to stay and fight, they deserve to be dead. 

Besides, he knows that head of blonde hair, knows that clever tongue, quipping one-liners even as she cuts a bloody path of destruction through the club. 

He knows that girl.

So, when the last vampire falls under her stake and sword combo and Marcel makes to launch himself off the catwalk to do battle, Klaus grabs him by the collar and holds him still.

Below them, the slayer victorious raises her gaze to meet his. She has to be in her thirties now, old, too old for any slayer, but her face doesn’t show it. She has lost the baby roundness of her face, the softness of her limbs, all woman now, all grown, but she looks nothing like the almost-forty she should be.

And her eyes, green and big and wide, look alive in a way they weren’t twenty years ago. 

“Niklaus,” she calls, and there is a predatory grin on her face. 

“Anne,” he returns. 

Marcel freezes, turning incredulous eyes on his sire. 

“It’s Buffy again, now, actually,” the slayer corrects, watching motionless as Klaus takes a leap and lands right in front of her. Marcel, smart boy, stays right where he is. Watching. 

“Love,” Klaus announces as he steps closer, takes in the absence of wrinkles and the age in her eyes. “You should be dust and ashes by now. But you haven’t even aged.”

She bats her lashes at him, playful and open. He likes it. “Are you saying I still look seventeen? You charmer!” Then she shrugs, lowering her weapons. “Accelerated cell growth makes for rapid healing. It also keeps the skin _really_ smooth.”

She demonstrates by turning her head this way and that. 

“Got over your little funk then, eh?”

Arms spreading, sword and stake extended, she grins. “Born weapon, remember? And while we’re talking business, there’s way too many people dying in this city, Mr. Mikaelson. Sloppy.”

“Bloodiest name in history, remember?” he echoes, then waves her concern off. “There was a war, recently. It’s under control now. And you just culled the vampire population enough to put us back below the radar.”

He sends Marcel a dark look over his shoulder at that. The man’s methods have always been too flashy. Maybe Klaus taught him too well. But that was in a bygone age. Today, news coverage is global and there are no places left to hide. Quiet is the name of the game, now. At least for a monster planning on staying put, for once.

“Pity. I kind of wanted to fight you.”

He rolls his eyes. “I told you, that thing cannot kill me.”

She rolls her eyes right back. “I’m sure I have some white oak tucked away somewhere, Niklaus. It’d be a fair fight, don’t worry.”

Oh, yes, he likes this new version of her. 

“Or,” he counters, “you could shower off the dead minions and have dinner with me.”

Behind him, Marcel makes a choked-off noise. Klaus grins. Buffy gives him a long, searching look. Then she shrugs, nonplussed expression on her face and some of that damaged girl must still be inside her somewhere, because she should be killing him, but she looks like she just doesn’t care enough to try. 

Instead she tucks away her weapons and rolls the kinks out of her shoulders.

“Sure, why not?”

+

**Author's Note:**

> Come tumble with me [here](http://www.wordsformurder.tumblr.com/).


End file.
